Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 1001: Into the Maw

Kaiden Grey went through the wall of violet light at a dead sprint, and the war behind him ended between one stride and the next.

The barrage, the roar, the crash of the horde against his family’s line, all of it cut off at once, and what the crossing handed back in its place was a tunnel coming the other way.

The roar had called the dungeon up to the surface, and only the head of that column had gotten there.

The rest was still climbing. Four meters of road packed wall to wall with no end to it his eyes could find, shell-boars shouldering along the bottom in stacked slabs of bone plate, hounds pouring over their backs on scythe-legs, mantids running the ceiling upside down above all of them.

Several million people watched Kaiden Grey look at that and run faster into the maw of danger.

<BIG BROTHER!!>

’I see it.’

<That’s the whole dungeon, that’s the entire dungeon coming up at you!>

’I know. I’m sorry for doing this to you.’

<Sorry????????????> The tone changed instantly. <For taking me with you into the most dangerous moments of your life???>

’Well, yeah. This isn’t how a big brother-’

<Silence!!> Alice demanded with uncharacteristic authority when addressing Kaiden. <I’ll kick your butt. I’m serious.>

’...Let’s start blasting, little sis.’

<Finally, the right attitude!> Alice crowed, and started blasting.

They met twenty strides inside the door.

He was already in Wrath, the heat coming up out of his chest and down both arms until the greatsword burned along its edge, and the first horizontal he threw removed the front rank.

Two boars came apart at the shoulder. The hound riding the second one hit the ceiling in three pieces. The wall took what was left and wore it.

Alice’s halo turned four meters of packed monster gold.

Then, all the way down the road ahead of him, the column stopped climbing.

He got to watch it happen as a ripple, a wave running backward through hundreds of bodies, boars planting their feet and swinging their heads around, hounds pouring back over their shoulders, rank after rank turning in place until the whole tunnel was facing his direction.

Whatever the thing up top had sent them out to do did not matter anymore. There was a man inside their dungeon, and he was walking down toward their core.

<...They all turned around,> Alice said.

’Good.’ Kaiden went faster into them, and the grin that came onto his face had no fun in it at all, and the stream had never gotten a clean look at that one before. ’The girls are already fighting a boss monster and many of its minions.’

[You’ve slain Shell-Boar (Level 73). +10,500 XP.]

[You’ve gained 8 DMP.]

[You’ve slain Spider-Hound (Level 71). +9,500 XP.]

[You’ve gained 8 DMP.]

A mantid came over the top of a dying boar and rode Kaiden into the wall before he got the crossguard into its face, and the stone opened his scalp above the ear. Blood ran into his left eye. He blinked it out and did not stop moving.

He kept going down.

The dungeon core had to be destroyed, and to do that, he had to reach the boss room.

Everything he had already gone past was coming back down the tunnel after him and everything below was still climbing up into him, so he fought that whole stretch as the thing in the middle, greatsword going one way and gauntlet going the other.

Most side passages he cut past were packed shut with rubble and mortared over with grey-green carapace. The thing up top had rebuilt its own home into one long throat that only went down, and Kaiden was in it now, and so was everything it owned.

Fine by him. Saved him looking.

Where the road bent around a flooded sinkhole they came up out of the black water on both sides at once, spider-hounds in rows, eye clusters throwing his sister’s light back at him, shells patched over in plate cut off something bigger than they were.

The greatsword met them at the rim and put most of the first rank into the water in pieces.

[You’ve slain Spider-Hound (Level 72). +10,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 8 DMP.]

[You’ve slain Spider-Hound (Level 74). +11,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 8 DMP.]

The windows stacked down the edge of his vision, tidy and patient. Behind the hounds came more hounds, and behind those the tunnel lit again as the dungeon paid the next cycle out into the road ahead of him.

<Big Brother, push! Don’t look back, I have your back!>

The private channel cut in flat and fast, the work voice she almost never used.

<The mana down here is a loop. They die, the gate eats them, the dungeon makes them again. As long as the core is alive this does not stop. We need to end it, not kill them all.>

’On it.’

He stopped finishing fights.

The greatsword quit hunting kills and started making doors, one detonation at a time. Kaiden went through the holes it punched while the wave was still alive and screaming on both sides of him.

A mantid took the corner off his shoulder guard. A hound got its scythe-leg into the back of his calf and lost the leg for it. The cut stayed, and his boot filled up warm.

He did not slow down for any of it.

...

The road went down, the dungeon got bigger, and so did what lived in it.

The fodder stayed in the seventies, hounds, mantids, pale boars that had never seen the sun, dying in ones and twos wherever they touched him. Then the dungeon stopped sending fodder and started sending residents.

The crag-backed bull came up the switchback head down, bellowing, two loaded trucks of muscle and horn under a spine grown over in slabs of fused dungeon rock, and it did not care about the greatsword at all.

The dungeon’s owner had been cutting pieces off that back. The harvest scars ran its whole length in tidy parallel lines, healed over, grown out, and opened again.

<No!> Alice was too late to help.

The first exchange put him on its horns. He got the blade across its face. It did not slow a step. The horn caught him under the arm, threw him into the wall hard enough to punch the air out of him in one flat grunt, and brought rock and old carapace down on top of him.

"The boss monster truly is a chimera fuck, huh? Cutting pieces off its minions..."

He was up before the dust was. The bull hit him again.

Second exchange, he went for the legs. The bull turned into the cut and caught him with its shoulder instead, and this time the wall took his ribs. Something along his side opened. He heard it before he felt it.

<Big brother->

’I know.’

Third pass, he went at it. Down the switchback at a dead run into a head-down charge, both of them closing the same gap, and at the last stride he ran up the wall, came off it inside the horns, and put the greatsword through its eye to the crossguard.

The bull carried him three steps and went down with its head in the gravel.

[You’ve slain Deep Crag-Bull (Level 108). +240,000 XP.]

[You’ve gained 26 DMP.]

"...Okay," Alice said out loud, forgetting the feed entirely. "Okay, that was- Big Brother, they’re coming over the corpse!"

’Yeah. We can’t stop.’